Philosophy: Ursprung in Benjamin

Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee (1920). Benjamin would focus on this and other similar images to come up with a peculiarly backwards-looking teleology: by consuming history in the manner of great angels, we construct the future.

Last Thursday, I attended a job talk delivered by an applicant for a new job at my school. I sort of liked his presentation on the ways to pick out signs of traumatic memories in 1950s Korean melodramas, and pointing towards the 1961 film "Stray Bullet" as an example of a breakthrough in overcoming convention to say something about the invisibility of state violence in Korean lives.

B., one of the more theoretically sophisticated members of the department, asked the applicant whether he had considered the "limitations" of the genre he had chosen -- melodrama, a popular form of Korean film loosely resembling American film noir. B. pointed to Walter Benjamin's work on the trauerspiel as an example of trying to figure out the "limitations of the capacity to represent allegory as a result of the history of the form." Or so I have in my notes -- no doubt I did not catch the words exactly. The applicant responded quite well, I think, by saying that that was why he wanted to emphasize the origins of the Korean melodrama in the Japanese colonial period, as an imported, but nevertheless popularly re-appropriated genre. Certain Korean melodrama makers were also involved in the production of Japanese-supervised war propaganda, for instance. But I think B.'s point is well taken if, looking back, the applicant did not exactly say why it's important that the rules of Korean melodrama have a certain history. Indeed, when I go over my notes, it seems that the applicant's only comment on the continuity of the careers of directors like Choi In-gyu, from propaganda to nation-nurturing melodrama, was that they perhaps exhibit "irony," and no further elaboration.

This was perhaps a bad mistake, or perhaps not. It's always difficult to state the correct scope of research in arts and literature in the age of cultural criticism. What is so often necessary, and repugnant for the Asian studies scholar, is a return to a canon of cultural studies founding fathers. Walter Benjamin is a particularly troublesome CSFF, because his theory seems at first glance to be a grand allegorical narrative that runs parallel to some weird middle-class European Jew's myth of the Messiah, language, and being itself. In fact, there is no doubt that this is what Benjamin is about; but questions persists as to the practical use-value of Benjamin's narrative. Is B. correct that it at least provides an example by which to question the limitations of a genre? Probably, or so it seems to me. Thus, there's nothing for it but to try to understand something of what Benjamin is about.

Here are my opening notes regarding such an endeavor, arranged bibliographically, of course:

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne and with an introduction by George Steiner. London: NLB, 1977.

Since Benjamin's take on the PhD dissertation left two entire departments at the University of Frankfurt utterly confused and, moreover, resentful, I am going to take my time with approaching the text. Even the Wikipedia article contains a warning that its own description of the work may be unclear and confusing, which offers more evidence that this is a work for which I require guides - previous readers who have stated well what is at stake in the text itself and its reception since the late 1920s. As for Wikipedia, it offers up that Benjamin takes the Trauerspiel as an example of a monad, which as I picture it now is an idea that penetrates and propagates through cultural history that can be grasped from two distinct perspectives at once: from one perspective the monad is a tiny fragment of the larger system, with a distinct shape like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle. But unlike ordinary jigsaw pieces, monads contain information that can be used to deduce the entire remainder of the puzzle. The implication seems to be that a single monad reveals a universe of history, all the way back an origin. Whoa -- it kind of freaks me out just to write that!

Pizer, J. “History, Genre and Ursprung in Benjamin's Early Aesthetics.” The German Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1987): 68–87. This essay offers new insights to Benjamin's work on the German tragedy, or Trauerspiel, for English readers who have German and are already familiar with the basic notion of the Trauerspiel and other European imaginative literature. I don't have this preparation, but I plunged ahead anyway, reading aloud the German passages at first, then passing over them lightly because I simply don't what many words mean.

Back to the ability of the monad to reveal history all the way back to the origin. "Origin" translates Benjamin's German term "Ursprung," which is just one of the difficult philosophical constructs involved in Benjamin's theories. There is the mystic grand narrative we mentioned before, the stakes of which are hazy in the best of times, a fact attested to by the wide variety of readings we see in professional philosophy literature on this point. Thus Pizer begins:

All serious explorations of the early aesthetics of Walter Benjamin have attempted to come to grips with his complex critical telos of redeeming the origin ("Ursprung") of the creative word of God by liberating language from its post-Adamite role of defining objects. Only by treating literary texts with a view to recovering language in its divine primordial condition, prior to the Fall and the division of subject and object, can such a redemption be approximated. As Richard Wolin constantly emphasizes in his book on Benjamin, "Origin is the goal,"' and Benjamin feels this goal can only be approached by abandoning the treatment of literary texts as external constructs to be
analyzed and demystified. Only an immanent approach can transcend the work's historical imprisonment and glean its truth content. This truth content always points towards an understanding anchored in the divine origin of the logos.

It is Pizer's chosen work to evaluate and reconcile readings of Benjamin -- Wolin wins consistently, but only a broad reading can capture all the significance of Ursprung as a property inhering in the Trauerspiel as an abstract idea. Grasping Ursprung does not mean that one is exploring an idea ahistorically, but somehow the inverse, that it marks out the traces of history around it in all directions:

This brief overview of some of the past critical struggles with "Ursprung" shows a remarkable range of opinions concerning the interrelationship postulated in Benjamin's theory between history and genre. To sum up: "Ursprung" establishes the historical character of the genre, transcends the historical character of the genre, overcomes the ahistorical character of the usual view of genre, establishes the pre- and post-historical character of the genre, and transcends the accidental character of the history of the genre. Other treatments of "Ursprung" have emphasized the telos motivating the relationship of history and structure within the genre/work.

For Ursprung to do so much work seems impossible, but this is no mere idea or property we are talking about, but a monad.

Most interpreters of "Ursprung" have ignored its Leibnizian derivation. An important exception is Wolin, who indicates "the category of 'monad' serves as an additional illustration of the being and specificity of the idea. Like origin, the monad knows history not in terms of its extensive empirical being, but as something integral and essential." This is also true in relation to the literary genre. The Leibnizian monad is characterized by "plenitude, continuity and harmony." The plenitude -Benjamin uses the term "Totalitat" of form grounded in the "Wissenschaft vom Ursprung" is based on its ideational character. The idea is the configuration of the apparently contradictory
extremes of phenomena. This gives the idea a plenitude redeeming it from the linear character of history. ...In The Monadology (1715), Leibniz comments that "although each created monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which is particularly affected by it and of which it is the entelechy."

The term "entelechy" is a new and difficult one for me. According to Wikipedia, its something like the potential inherent in one body to become some other body, in a certain context. How's that for obscure? Wood, for example, may have as one entelechy the state of being made into boards and then a house, at least in consideration of wood as a building material, which of course happens when you are building a house. Similarly, a society can take on the entelechy of decline, sort of like the wood seeing itself as a burnt-down house, I suppose, which it might see if it was burning. I presume that Leibniz wanted society not to take on the entelechy of decline, but of progress, and this would be its chief engine towards that end. It's like when your coach tells you that keeping your eye on the ball will result in your catching the ball, that kicking the ball towards the goal will put the ball in the goal, and then you find that indeed it does, at least much of the time. This is part of Leibniz's grand dream that all the potential and possibility for a civilized society exists inside any particular fragment of the society, as long as the receptive mind was there to see it. As for the receptive mind, this is ideally the Enlightenment subject, an abstract consciousness that is a self portrait of Leibniz himself, but also at the same time God, as well. As Pizer continues (and runs a bit beyond my ability to comprehend fully):

The internal, perfected nature and form-engendering energy of Aristotle's entelechy imparts to the Leibnizian monad its self-sufficient integrity. The fact that the monads find their final cause and sufficient reason in God establishes harmony and continuity among them. But the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), which prefigures The Monadology epistemologically, establishes the fundamental immanence of all ideas. They are only linked externally by God.

Seriously, this for me is a nearly inscrutable way to conclude the discussion, though I do gather some sort of sarcastic humor is at work here.

But back to basics. The point of all this is that Benjamin at first looks like he is asking people who write about arts and literature to ignore the historical circumstances in favor of what the work gives of its own accord, but on closer inspection he is actually saying that when we look at a work in close enough detail, with enough intensity of philosophical reflection, then we can see all the history we need inside the work itself:

Whereas Der Begriff der Kunstkritik equates the idea of form with a continuum of forms, Benjamin represents the idea in the Trauerspiel book as a unique originary essence.24 This shift is necessary in order to establish an important thesis: the German Trauerspiel is not part of a continuum of the symbolic Greek tragedies. Rather, its "Ursprung" is grounded in a unique historical-philosophical moment, producing ideas embedded in the individual works. The task of the critic is to evoke these ideas through philosophical contemplation.

This certainly sounds very tough, if not impossible for a clumsy thinker such I as know myself to be. But as Pizer continues, it starts to seem like the basic idea behind most expository writing on arts and literature: we point out what crosses boundaries, and we do so that we may better understand how fine the art is:

The rejection of the establishment of a normative system of literary genres from both an inductive and a deductive position leaves Benjamin in the apparent position of endorsing a critical relativism which treats each particular work as an original category in toto. As such a view is foreign to Benjamin's aesthetics, it is natural that he distanced himself from it through a critique of the foremost modern proponent of the complete formal integrity of the individual work of art, Benedetto Croce. On the foundations of his refutation of Croce's nominalism, Benjamin formulates his concept of origin. He expresses support for Croce's rejection of the grouping of individual works of art into aesthetic categories, and the attempt to use genres to mediate between the universal and the particular. Benjamin deviates from Croce's rejection of the literary genres in endorsing the tragic and the comic as useful ideas. Unlike the concepts of "pure tragedy" and "pure comic drama," informed by the artificial inclusiveness of rule-based genre theories, the genre as idea is an internal structure. As such, it is neither prescriptive nor empirically comprehensive. Rather, as a monad, its totality is established by its incorporation of both the pre- and post-history of phenomena, including works of art. This indicates the fundamental link between origin and monad. A criticism based on the immanent totality of the idea rather than the extensive categories created by traditional genre poetics seeks what is generically exemplary in the individual work....A significant work is a transgressive work. The paradox that the "transgressive work will become a norm or a generic paradigm" precisely as it does away with norms is rooted in the principle of "Ursprung.

It seems that Benjamin wants to look to the edges of genres like Trauerspiel to see the greatest, because most transgressive, examples, which question the values and present something indicative of historical change, which we me reflect upon. That is one seed from which I must eventually grow my own idea of why we must continue to write about arts and literature.

Benjamin has a very subtle theory of how genre happens in history to be observed and reflected upon. The ideas for making art and literature come out of the ether of history, the mass unconscious, the cultural politcs, and then they coalesce onto the phenomena of history to form genre. Thus the Germans with Trauerspiel; thus the Chinese with wound literature; thus the Americans with The Simpsons and Family Guy. Water molecules coalesce onto bits of jagged surfaces to crystalize into ice; so the ideas and concerns of a people are caused by circumstance to arrange themselves into genre. The ability to see backwards from the genre -- here the Trauerspiel, coupled with contemporary reflection -- here Romantic criticism (oops, forgot to mention that before) to grasp the historical pattern behind it all is the hope and goal of Leibniz's theory of the world, and this is what Benjamin asks us to consider when we write about art and literature.

I will consider it. But I am thinking now back to a line from my first reading on Habermas, that younger and less pious member of the Frankfurt School, with a perhaps more fraught position among the CSFFs:

Habermas's basic philosophical endeavor was to develop a more modest, fallibilist, empirical account of the philosophical claim to universality and rationality. This more modest approach rids Critical Theory of its vestiges of transcendental philosophy, pushing it in a naturalistic, “postmetaphysical” direction (1988b). Such a naturalism identifies more specific forms of social-scientific knowledge that help in developing an analysis of the general conditions of rationality manifested in various human capacities and powers.

A dim vision appears in my head, of a vast and complex disagreement between the mystical and naturalistic branches of critical social theory. Habermas is over there grappling with sociologists, quantitative types who make tables and take polls. He is outside, in the air. Benjamin stays in, preferably in a place that is cool and not too brightly lit. He requires attention not to humans capacity to behave as nodes in a large chaotic system, for this is insulting to his sense of dignity and respect for the species. Instead he must look to what is immanent, to the godly self, a microworld filled with all the history of the entire world in every detail, wrapped up tightly in every genre, every work, every person and every idea if only conceived of and reflected upon with the proper depth of perspective.